1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer processing and, more particularly, to electronic documents management.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computer memory storage and data bandwidth increase, so does the amount and complexity of data that business and industry manage each day. A large portion of the data that may be managed in an enterprise involves content managed for a company or workgroup by a dedicated server, such as an enterprise information portal, which provides employees and customers the ability to search and access corporate information, including electronic documents, announcements, task, discussion topic, etc., that may be organized as lists of items. The enterprise information portal may serve as the gateway to log into the corporate network and retrieve electronic documents. It is noted that enterprise information portals are typically secure and private (also known as intranet portals), but also may include external gateways for wider or even public access.
An enterprise information portal often includes a back-end database system, which may serve as a document management system. The back-end database system may store data in the form of electronic documents, metadata, and/or other content associated with the portal, such as web pages. The back-end database in an enterprise information portal may be a variant of a stand-alone database system, which has been configured for document and content management. For example, the stand-alone database system may be used to store valuable business information.
Application logic may be attached to documents or items in these lists. For example, a sequence of conditions and actions may be attached to an item, a list, or a library. In various embodiments, such a sequence may be referred to as a “workflow”. Workflows may be used to manage a policy, or flow, of how work should be performed and assigned, in order to free a team to focus on the work itself. For example, a team may focus on drafting and reviewing contracts, whereas the predetermined workflow application logic may handle the sending of email notifications, the moving of documents to predetermined locations based upon the status of those documents, collecting data from specified users, logging history information, or otherwise.
Because electronic documents frequently contain crucial information, the contents of electronic document servers (e.g., an enterprise information portal along with its back-end database) may be archived, or backed up, to an archival storage to prevent loss or corruption of data. In particular, a back-end database is often backed up as a single, monolithic database file, which contains all the tables, records, and indexing information for the database. The workflow information may be included in these records and tables.
When a user wants to restore one or more items or lists and accompanying workflow information to the portal, the single database file may be reinstalled as a target of the portal. Unfortunately, reinstallation of a large, monolithic database may be time-consuming and inefficient when restoration of only a small number of items or lists is desired. There may also be occasions when a user desires the portal to be able to access an item in a raw file format rather than as a portal item or list. Further, there may be occasions when a user desires to have an application other than the portal access an electronic document, announcement, task, discussion topic, etc. Also, associated workflow information may not be tightly coupled to the items, lists, or libraries. Workflows determined to be associated with the requested items or lists may have multiple attributes and history logs stored in records that may not be easily distinguished from other items or lists.
In view of the above, it would be desirable to restore individual data objects including accompanying workflows from an archived database file without having to reinstall the database system and in a format that is accessible to either an enterprise information portal or another application.